Epitaph - A short film made using the power of ue4

Join us as the team behind Epitaph, a short cinematic film rendered in UE4, break down their inspiration, processes and scene construction as well as how they worked together efficiently and effectively as a team to create their stunning piece.

Introductions

Alexandre: My name is Alexandre Hubert. I was mainly in charge of the modelling aspect on Epitaph. I’ve been studying and practicing 3D since 2013. I’ve always been a gamer and entered this world through modding Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas before I decided to make a career out of it. To me, I see my job as an extension of my hobby from when I was a kid playing with Lego and Playmobil. Now, instead of building worlds physically, I build them virtually with more advanced tools. You can find my portfolio on Artstation and contact me through LinkedIn.

William: My name is William Labrie. I was working alongside Samuel on everything related to level art and lighting. I was also in charge of everything related to technical art. I started working in 3D when I was studying in Architecture. Then I switched my studies to video games where I met Alexandre and Samuel. I now work in the video games industry as a Lighting Artist in Montreal at Tuque Games. You can find my portfolio on Artstation and contact me through LinkedIn.

Samuel: Hey! My name is Samuel Moquin. I have been pretty busy with this project working on the level art, lighting, photoscanning, shaders, colour grading and camera sequences with William. I come from a freelance photography background which taught me a lot about the art of composition, the importance of colour balance and all the technical aspects of cameras and lights. I quickly figured out that working in 3D would be the perfect occasion to create from scratch my perfect shots. As a kid, I started playing video games at my neighbours house such as Diablo II and Need For Speed Underground. Good old time. You can find my portfolio on Artstation and contact me through LinkedIn.

Epitaph

Epitaph is an Unreal real-time rendered cinematic done as our final year university project at École NAD in Montréal. Epitaph explores the relation between Humanity and War since its dawn. War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, talks about how he was tasked with planting the seed of war in the mind of humanity. With the many centuries of war and its innocent victims, War has grown tired and disgusted of humanity blaming all their misery on him. In fact, they were the ones who nurtured that seed, made it flourish and made it thrive. In the end, their lust for blood brought them to their own doom, symbolised by a dead child. Epitaph was also a way for us to synthesize what we learnt in school. We wanted to create a project that was visually appealing  but also showed that we understood the technical aspects of a cinematic production pipeline. We made a point to strive higher than a mere environment showcase. We wanted to show that we were able to tell a story through our work. Our goal with Epitaph was also the create something that didn’t look like a typical student project.

Inspiration For Epitaph

From the get go, we knew we didn’t want all of the restrictions that come with making a video game, namely programming, asset optimisation, technical restraints, etc. Making a cinematic was the logical way to go as it allowed us to go crazy with our ideas and push our skills to their limits. William and Samuel first designed the first draft of the project, designing cinematic walking through war throughout humanity’s history. Once Alexandre joined the project, we added the narrative aspect that was missing from our short that would elevate it from simple environment showcasing to a full-blown narrative cinematic. From there, we searched for works that explored the same themes as us. For the narrative aspect, we looked through video games, movies, books and even songs to inspire the monologue heard throughout the film. As for the visual aspect, we did a lot of research to pinpoint the level of quality we strived for. Photogrammetry was always something we wanted to explore, so we looked at projects that did similar work, namely Unity’s Book of the Dead and Quixel’s Rebirth.

Planning

We started by dividing the monologue into different eras. That gave us roughly 6 scenes: introduction shot based in the prehistoric era transitioning to a nature shot and then to a medieval ambush. The action then moves on to a Civil War battlefield, transits to a WWI muddy trench and then to a crashed WWII Japanese fighter plane. For the final shot, we wanted to give a modern times vibe without giving a specific time frame. William and Samuel each picked 3 scenes to work on and quickly blocked out each levels and added basic camera shots. We knew that we needed a quick reference to see if our project was something possible to make in 3 months. It also helped us list out assets that were gonna be needed, allowing Alexandre to block out placeholder meshes of the most important props. We then simply build over our foundation, replacing, deleting, reworking everything until we were satisfied with our result. This process called “iteration” was taught to us in École NAD as an efficient way to work while staying flexible and allowing us to see problems before they arrive.

Texturing

For the unique mostly hard-surface assets we used Substance Painter. This deliberate choice was made for different reasons. Substance Painter offered us the opportunity fully control the final look of the mesh. It assured us that no repetition would be visible and that we could add details wherever we wanted without being constrained. Optimisation was not a huge concern, so we took advantage of it. All the base materials were created from scratch inside Substance Painter as Smart Materials. That way, if a modification was needed on a specific prop, it was easy to come back, change the desired parameter and export the new texture maps. For the generic textures mostly used on the terrains and organic assets, we used Quixel Mixer. This software allowed us to use basic photoscan materials and blend them to achieve the wanted result in only few minutes.

We also set up a good library of shaders to further help us create realistic environments. We managed to set up a Blend Shader with up to 12 available textures (again, optimization was NOT a concern). That allowed use to paint our terrain and ensure that no possible repetition would be visible.

Barn Scene Breakdown

In this scene, we wanted to focus on the American Civil War conflict set in the 1800s. We tried to capture iconic landscapes and landmarks that we identified in our visual researches. The Civil War was often fought on open fields, previously used as farms and other civilian installations. Initially, we had an era appropriate 36-stars American flag. We were concerned that the viewer may not be able to properly identify the era of the scene, the canon and musket not being in the immediate focus, so we changed the flag to a Confederate flag which we found more iconic.

In this shot, we wanted to lead the viewer’s eye from right to left. We did a deep black vignetting on the right to put the starting focus on the old barn. We also used leading lines to keep guiding the eye with the fence and the rifle in the front of the building to bring focus to the dead horse on the ground. We felt including death in our scenes would bring more weight to the overall tone of the scene. The red horse is a very important symbol in our storyline since it is a visual representation of War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (who rode a bright red horse). Finally, the landscape in the back created a natural leading line that brings the viewer’s eye to the background decors with another destroyed barn and a dead tree, helping create this sense of wide open battlefield. For this shot, it was important to show the bloody aftermath of a 1800s fight with all the death and misery that comes with it. So we went with a more overcast lighting with very few natural light breakthrough. We brought a lot of fog in the background to get a more hazy look. We also tried to use earthy colour like the green, brown and a light atmospheric blue to make the red of the flag pop out a little bit more. Having an emphasis on the flag was vital to help the viewer understand which time period this scene was set in.

Tank Scene Breakdown

This scene is set in what we call the modern times. We made sure to not specify precisely the time period to the viewer. We hope that we could help selling the idea that this could be happening right now or in a near future. Creating some sort of anxiety in the viewer’s mind was the goal here. The general idea is that a tank got stranded on a remote region in a forest road. It is stopped, as the road collapsed in front of it. Later on, we discover why it really stopped with our strong finale.

This scene was a tough one to do. We struggled to achieve a good composition and for a long time, we didn’t know how it would turn out. Since this scene was so closely tied to our ending, we needed to figure out the ending first and build the scene around it. When we finally settled on the symbolic weight of a dead child, it all became much clearer on how we should sell this scene. The first thing we wanted the viewers to see was the tank. We made sure to make it as big and bulky as possible without being grotesque. We used artificial light coming from the telephone poles to highlight the tank. The scene is mostly naturally lit with a late day blue hours kind of feel. This why we logically went with the opposite colour orange for the street lamps to form a strong contrast and thus forming a highlight on the tank. We counterbalanced this strong highlight on the left with a cold, blue light on the left. To make sure that the scene would stay evenly distributed, the idea was made to had a bright yellow road sign to the right. Since we are in a forest scene, the tank had to be green to make sense narratively. This caused a big problem since the background consists mostly of greenish trees. We decided to add various brightly coloured accessories to the back of the tank in hopes that would help make it strand out.

For most of our shot, we used guiding lines to help the viewer read the shot more easily. It starts on the far left with the road guard leading up to the tank and then the street, the right road guard and the electric wire of the street lamp that lead up to the middle of the road where we see the broken street and the crooked street lamp.

Teamwork

The three of us have been friends since the start of our studies in 2016. Epitaph wasn’t our first project together and through trial and error, we already identified good ways to work. William and Samuel were naturally drawn to the level art and photoscan parts of the project. Both being level artists, it was logical that they would handle this part. It was as logical for Alexandre to take up the task of modelling everything that couldn’t be photoscanned, him being a 3D modeller. It all came together naturally.

Benefits of Working as a Team

Being only three of us allowed for an organic organisation without any appointed leader among us. Each of us being complementary to the others, we took turn in making decisions when it affected our field of expertise. We established a general guideline at the start of our project with milestones, but we didn’t follow it precisely. We more or less survived week to week by following short milestones while keeping to bigger goal (and deadline) in mind. There wasn’t any ego problem like it is often the case in our field. Being friends and having previously worked together many times, we weren’t scared of critique. We all respect and think highly of each other, allowing our critiques to be always respectful and well-meaning.

Did You Have Team Review Sessions or Just Toss the Work?

Quick answer, we mostly tossed the work. Long answer, we kinda did both. Among ourselves, we didn’t need review sessions as we were in constant contact with one another. William and Alexandre worked next to each other for 3 straight months and we did daily calls with Samuel. We always knew what each member was working on and we gave frequent updates to each other. Again, working with three members allowed us to have an organic structure without the need of a strong organisational system that we used on previous projects with more members.

Still, we did have review meetings with our project supervisor Nicolas Cantin, Art Director at Panache Studios Inc. Nicolas took on the unofficial hat of producer on Epitaph. In reality, he was more of a mentor to us than anything else. He gave us a lot of freedom to experiment and gave his thought and advised us when we needed it. Each two weeks, we would go grab a bite with Nicolas and show him our current progress. He’d then question, advise and give his thought on the spot or come back to us with detailed feedback some days later. These meetings helped us settle realistic short-term milestones while also keeping us in line with what we were trying to do. It happened more than once where we went crazy on cool idea that we had. Sometimes, this idea just didn’t fit in the whole picture, like an attempt at a desert scene set in the Crusades era we tried and quickly scrapped. Sometimes, the narrative impact of the scene wasn’t as strong as we needed, like a cool scene we wanted to do set in the Gulf War with flaming oil rigs in the distance, Jarhead-style. Nic was often there to help us keep the whole picture in mind.

How Did Working Together Help You Grow As Artists?

While always being friendly to one another, there was also some sort of friendly competition that was always brewing in the background. Whenever one of us did a really cool thing on the project, the two others congratulated him while low-key trying to figure out how to outdo it. This friendly challenge helped to always move forward and never stagnate. We always strived to grow and get better and being surrounded by talented individuals helped us to keep this goal in mind. It’s been this way since the start of our friendship really and it shows in our progression as artists. It’s all about being rightfully surrounded and keeping our goals in mind. In this positive mindset, you’ll put the work you need to achieve those goals. Everything else comes naturally after that.

Inspiration

We always thought it was important to look beyond the realm of video games to get inspiration for our work. The three of us are all avid gamers, obviously, but we also have many interests outside this field. Whether it be photography, history, hiking or cinema, we cultivated these passions and channelled them into our work. By staying confined in the realm of video games, you run the risk of repeating stuff that has already been made. It’s a trap that makes it harder to stand out.

Feedback

We gave a lot of feedback to one another and took a lot from Nicolas Cantin. Most of the time, it was enough. Although sometimes, we liked to reach outside of our team to get some fresh look at our work. One of our concept artist friends Alexandre Turcotte-Gervais was a lot of help by doing paintovers on our scenes. It was often quicker for him to draw different scenarios than it was for us to try different compositions. That allowed us to get a quick idea of what we wanted to do with specific scenes where we had less inspiration. Other than that, we reached out to some of our professors. Their outlooks were interesting in the sense that they didn’t care much for the specific assets or level art. Instead they generally focused on the general flow of the cinematic and the narrative aspects, something we sometimes lost when buried in our work.

What Can We Be On The Lookout From You In The Future?

Fortunately, we all have found work after we completed Epitaph. William and Samuel stayed together and went on to work at Tuque Games, a Wizards of the Coast company, working on Dark Alliance. Samuel as a Level Artist and William as a Lighting Artist. Alexandre for his part found work at Red Barrels as a 3D Modeller, working on Outlast: Trials. We still regularly talk to each other and plan on doing more collaborative projects together. We plan on going back to the roots and taking a fresh look at one of our first collaborative project we did together. We’re eager to put our new knowledge to the test and see how far we’ve come since then.

Outro

Epitaph was the perfect way for us to end our university. It was a big project with lots of obstacles. The fact that we managed to fulfil each one of our objectives is something we are very proud of. We hope that we can help other people achieve this through this article. Keep your goals in sight, cultivate your social circle and push your boundaries everyday. Many thanks to the Experience Points staff for giving us this opportunity.

Thanks for those who got this far,

Epitaph Team